Monthly Newsletter

November 2005

Volume 3; Issue 11

ECS Imaging, Inc.
877.790.1600
www.ecsimaging.com

support@ecsimaging.com
sales@ecsimaging.com

Southern CA

3720 Sunnyside Dr. Ste. 200
Riverside, CA 92506

Tel: 951.787.8768

Fax: 951.787.0831

Northern CA

4737 Imhoff Unit 1B

Martinez, CA

925.370.2456

End of the Year Specials!

      Agenda Manager

In celebration of the new feature being able to scan into the Agenda Manager Web-based Application, we will be including at no charge a 50 image per minute duplex, color desktop scanner! 

A $1,195 value: Xerox 252 Scanner, Kofax VRS 4 and Installation.

      Any Laserfiche purchase will get your organization a free scholarship to the Laserfiche Institute in February for 3 days of Training.  

     Details click here.

      Laserfiche Plus CD/DVD Publishing.  Laserfiche Plus is a CD/DVD Wizard tool to publish Laserfiche documents onto portable CD/DVD's with a Laserfiche viewer on each. Offered at $2,995 retail.  (Annual for Plus is still based on the regular price). 

Orders must be received before Dec 20, 2005 to qualify.

Upcoming Events

We look forward to seeing many of our customers as

we participate at the following association shows.

CETPA Annual Conference

CA Educational Technology Professionals Assoc.

CSAC 111^th Annual Meeting

CA State Assoc. of Counties

CACEO New Law Workshop

CA Assoc. of Clerks & Election Officials

Join Us At Our Quarterly User Group Meeting at

December 7, 2005

2002 Iowa Ave, Suite 100

Riverside, CA 2507

(951) 248-0014

Click for Directions

To register, send your contact information to sales@ecsimaging.com

Did you attend our Annual Customer Conference?

Help us make your conference even better next year!

Online Survey Click Here

ECS Services

Digital Recorder Importer
ECS Map Measuring Tool
ECS Search Tool
Mug Shot Capture          Six-Pack Creator
ESRI 2-way Integrations
Custom Integrations
Conversions
Scanning Services

Microfiche Conversion
Hosted WebLink

Servers & Scanners

Have a question about your Laserfiche system?

Call or email our ECS Tech Support hotline 877-790-1600 or

email

support@ecsimaging.com

 GIS Integrations?

ECS offers integrations between Laserfiche 7 and ESRI or AutoDesk products. Client and Web Based solutions are available.

Scantron Introduces New Innovative Scanner

Clarity 120 – SIMR and Image Scanner

    30% Faster than traditional OMR Scanning

    60% More Accurate

    Single Pass IMR/Image

Spotlight

Education 2005

“No File Left Behind”

Education Customers Graduated to version 7.1 Laserfiche

Barstow College

Currently Admissions and Accounting departments are taking advantage, but district wide usage is in the plans with the recently purchased Weblink intranet access to files.

Gateway College

Leading the way in Phoenix at the Admissions office moving to 7 to enhance security.

Long Beach Community College

The Laserfiche/ECS team has agreed to supply to LBCC an upgraded Laserfiche system to enable current Admissions team to have the capability of Laserfiche 7 and Support of ECS to move from Version 5 to Version 7.  In addition the Purchasing and Contracts departments will be implemented. 

Rio Hondo Community College

Moving forward their 10 years spent scanning into Laserfiche, they were ready for the new faster and more flexible scanning options in Laserfiche 7.

USC

Multiple departments across LA realizing the benefits of imaging this year.

Alvord Unified School District

Staging to go district wide with their implementation, moving to 7 was a first step.

Charter Oak Unified School District

Jumping from version 5 to 7 to utilize new features and gear up to expand to the high schools with usage via Laserfiche WebAccess.

Colton Joint Unified School District

Leaping from 5 to 7 for ease of use and to implement the Records Management Module.

Jurupa Unified School District

Savings from the need to hire additional staff, the Purchasing department will be starting new on version 7.

Moreno Valley Unified School District

What started in Purchasing to circumvent hiring more employees has expanded district wide utilizing Quick Fields automation tools and scanners at every location to streamline paper files.

Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District

With district wide usage, they are anxiously waiting to implement Quick Fields and Snapshot to automate manual processes in Human Resources and Purchasing.

Santa Ana Unified School District

Long time usage in Student Records, now the whole district is reaping the benefits of Laserfiche 7 with all departments utilizing ECS Scanning Services to get them up to speed in less than a year.

Sweetwater Union High School District

Originally just utilized in Payroll department for many years, this year Planning, Accounting, Human Resources and Fiscal Services all realized the benefits of electronic filing and sharing of files.

Tamalpais Union High School District

From Counseling department to the Human Resources.

Imperial County Office of Education

Purchasing's first goal this year to meet growing requirements and not being able to hire additional staff was met with our Laserfiche implementation.

Los Angeles County Office of Education

Utilizing Quick Fields to auto process thousands of files and Snapshot to update 6,000 employee records NPA's on a quarterly basis, they also needed an Auto–Synchronization Routine between Laserfiche and their HRS database implemented this year.

Laserfiche

Product Center

Tech Tips

Laserfiche Support Site

Free for all Laserfiche users with current LSAP.

Current Versions:

Client-Server 7.1.2

Quick Fields 7.1

Scan Connect 7.1

Email (Mapi) 7.1

Plus 7.1.2

Audit Trail 7.1

Agenda Manager 7.1

WebAccess 7.1

Toolkit 7.1

Integrator's Toolkit 7.1

Workflow 7.0

Snapshot 7.0.2

Import Agent 7.0.1

WebLink 7.0

Integration Express-H.T.E. 7

BarCode 6.2

Integration Express 6.0

ECS Partners

Announcements

New Agenda Manager officially launched November 1

The new Laserfiche Agenda Manager 7.1 launched officially Tuesday, November 1. The exclusive previews for current local government customers have generated high-volume Webinar attendance in recent weeks.  ECS can demo the new Agenda Manager product at your site and show the many benefits to automate your agenda process.

Announcing the release of Snapshot 7.0.2

Laserfiche is pleased to announce the release of Snapshot 7.0.2.  This update streamlines Snapshot's integration with other Laserfiche products, simplifying firewall configuration and license sharing. Additionally, users can now opt to auto-OCR images printed with Snapshot when they are imported into the repository.

Publishing by volume in Plus 7.1.2

Laserfiche Plus 7.1.2 now features publishing by volume.  If you choose Publish with a document selected, Plus will automatically default to publishing by volume.  If you choose Publish with a folder selected, Plus will list that folder for publishing by default; however, during the publishing process you can choose to publish a volume or volumes instead.  If you publish multiple volumes, the volume distinctions will be preserved in the published repository.

Laserfiche and eCopy introduce the Laserfiche Connector for network copiers

Laserfiche and eCopy, Inc., have introduced the Laserfiche Connector for eCopy ShareScan OP, which enables office teams to use a network-attached copier or scanner to add paper documents to their Laserfiche-supported business processes. The Connector maintains document security through unique user permissions at the copier level. The software also provides a comprehensive audit trail. 

Laserfiche earns Navy certification

Laserfiche has earned certification as a qualified Navy/Marine Corps Intranet vendor.  The certification is especially significant because it is taking place while the Navy is working aggressively to reduce the number of certified applications.

Tech Tips

Setting image display for Laserfiche Scanning or Quick Fields

You can determine what images to display in the Image Display pane in Laserfiche Scanning (Standard mode) or Quick Fields.  Choosing to display the images as they are scanned or processed can allow you to visually monitor the process, while choosing to display only the selected tree item can speed up processing, since the images being processed do not need to be rendered for display.  Therefore, you can configure the display to suit your installation's particular needs.
 
To configure image display in Laserfiche Scanning, select Options from the Tools menu.  Select the desired image display.  In Quick Fields, select Options from the Tools menu.  In the Advanced tab, select the desired image display.

Populating template fields in Laserfiche Scanning 7.1.x

When scanning with Laserfiche Scanning 7.1.x in Standard mode, you can drag text from the text pane of a scanning session into a template field.  This allows you to quickly copy information from the document – for instance, the document title or author – directly into the template fields.
 
In order to populate template fields in this fashion, you will need to perform the International OCR on the scanned pages.  Then, display the template fields tab and the Text pane.  Select the section of text you wish to place in the field, and drag it from the text pane to the template field.  When you release the text, it will be placed in the desired box.  Please note that this will not move the text from the text pane; it will only copy it.

Laserfiche 7.1 repository:

How to set up the rights so that the user cannot manage Access Rights

While this user is not a part of any groups you have made, every user is a member of the Everyone group.  When a new repository is created, the Everyone group is granted all Entry Access Rights within the repository, including Access Control at the root level and inheriting down the folder structure.  Access Control allows users to set Access Rights on a particular folder or document.  In this case, since Everyone has Access Control at the root level, inherited, all users can change Access Rights for all folders and documents.

The reason behind this preliminary setup, granting Everyone all Entry Access Rights, is that it allows an organization to get started with Laserfiche without being required to set up security.  Some organizations may be using Laserfiche for archival and management of non-sensitive documents, and the initial setup allows these organizations to use Laserfiche “out of the box” with regards to security.  However, most organizations will want to make changes to this setup as appropriate to the documents they are managing. 

Access Control is useful for a user or group when it has its “own” folder for storing documents, and may need to let others have access to this folder from time to time.  We refer to this as “discretionary security,” because users and groups can allow others access to their own items at their discretion. 

To change the initial setup to a more granular use of Access Control rights, you will have to first remove the Everyone group's Access Control right at the root level.  Then, you should assign each user and group Access Control to individual entries (and/or make use of inheritance) as appropriate.  The same method holds true for changing other Entry Access Rights.

What Quick Fields does without the add-on modules

Quick Fields is our capture and classification platform, and the base application is a powerful batch processing, remote scanning, and auto-filing tool.  For batch scanning, a large number of pages is brought into the system and visually represented for quick sorting.  Zoom fields, which are set to zoom to a particular location when a corresponding template field is selected, dramatically improve key-from-image speed.  Utilizing keyboard shortcuts, the process of sorting a batch of documents can be much faster within Quick Fields than when done by hand with paper documents prior to scanning.

Once in Quick Fields, the documents are cleaned up and prepared to be sent to Laserfiche.  A number of image enhancements are available to make the documents easier to read (both by humans and by OCR software), assisting the scanning operators that are filing and populating templates as well as increasing OCR accuracy.  Quick fields also provides remote scanning capabilities, which allow documents to be processed and sorted, but then sent to Laserfiche at a later time—for example, during non-peak hours when network bandwidth is not an issue.  The Laserfiche Capture Engine automates the import and re-filing of Laserfiche documents, allowing for Quick Fields image enhancements and other processes to be easily applied to documents already in your repository.

Quick Fields can send documents to Laserfiche fully OCRed and ready to be accessed by other users.  Included in the base application is also the ability to extract template information from the document name and path, allowing some fields to be automatically populated and folder structures to be dynamically created.

Printing with Profiles in Laserfiche Snapshot

You can create profiles in Snapshot to manage different Snapshot printer settings.  This allows you to create several configurations of paper size and orientation, image resolution, watermark and annotation and switch between them quickly and easily.  You can also export these settings as a file and use that file to apply them on different computers, which allows you to apply uniform printer settings to Snapshot jobs.  Or you could use these settings to easily reconfigure settings for different file types: For instance, you might have one resolution for documents that will be OCRed and another for documents that won't, or you might have one set of paper dimensions for pages printed from your Web browser and another for pages printed from Adobe Reader.

To create a profile, open the Properties dialog for the Laserfiche Snapshot 7 printer.  The link to this dialog may vary depending on the program from which you are printing; it can usually be reached from a button in the Print dialog called Options, Properties or Printer Preferences.  Configure the print job with the settings you want to have saved in the profile – paper size and orientation, resolution, file format and quality, watermark, annotations, and so on.  Then select the Profile Manager tab. To save these settings, click "Add current settings as a new profile."  You will be prompted to set a name and description for the profile.

To use an existing profile, simply select the profile from the list in the "Select and use an existing profile" option.  This will apply the settings from that profile.

You can also select "Export a profile to a file," which will export the settings as a .bip file.  You can apply these settings to another installation by importing this .bip file, which will add it to the list of existing profiles.

Differences between Executive and Notebook

Laserfiche offers three standalone packages, Executive, Desktop, and Notebook.  Each of these standalones is meant for a unique purpose, and thus each has different benefits and limitations.  They all use MSDE on the backend, which is bundled with the installation.

Executive is designed to be a standalone version of the full Laserfiche Client/Server, so it offers the full functionality of the Client for one licensed user.  That user can scan and OCR, create as many volumes as necessary, and store as many pages as MSDE allows. 

Desktop is our standalone solution for small organizations or persons with limited needs.  Thus, it allows one user to create only a single volume with a limit of 16,000 pages, and cannot support any additional Laserfiche modules.

Notebook is meant to supplement a Laserfiche Client/Server system by allowing workers outside the main office, such as public service workers out in the field, to access documents without a connection to the main Laserfiche Server by taking a portion of the repository with them on a laptop computer.  As such, Notebook can allow one user to store as many volumes and pages as MSDE and the computer's hardware will allow, but it does not include the capability to scan and OCR.  Documents are, instead, imported into Notebook from the main system as briefcases or volumes already OCRed and indexed.

Customizing a Laserfiche Client 7 shortcut

You can customize the desktop shortcut to the Laserfiche Client 7 to automatically log you in to a particular Laserfiche repository.  For users who only use one repository, or installations that only have one repository, this reduces the time spent choosing the repository from the Client's starting screen.
 
To specify a particular repository for a desktop shortcut to the Laserfiche Client, right-click the shortcut to the Laserfiche Client and select Properties.  Select the Shortcut tab.  In the Target option, you will see a line similar to the following:

"C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Client\LF.exe"
Add to this line so that it looks like the following example:
"C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Client\LF.exe" -L "RepositoryName"
where RepositoryName is the name of the repository you wish to automatically log in to.
 
Once this has been done, if you open the Laserfiche Client, it will automatically bring up the log in dialog for that repository – no need to select it from the list.
 
If you have configured Windows Accounts in Laserfiche or associated Windows users with Laserfiche users, you can use Windows Authentication to automatically log users in to Laserfiche.  You can modify the Target option in the following fashion:

"C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Client\LF.exe" -L "RepositoryName" –U
 
When a Windows user opens the Client using this shortcut, they will be automatically logged in to Laserfiche if a Windows Account or Laserfiche user has been associated with that Windows user.